Effect of arm models on transmission characteristics of transmitter for on-body centric wireless communications

Abstract

With the rapid progress of electronic and information technology, body area network (BAN) has been widely used for biomedical monitoring systems using the human body as a transmission medium. In this paper, the effect of the type of arm models on electric field distribution and attenuation constant of on-body transmission have been investigated. In order to assess the sensitivities of the transmission characteristics of electrode on human body due to the different arm models, the attenuation constant of two human arm models are quantitatively compared using the finite-difference time-domain method. A homogeneous cylinder and a cubic are used as arm models, and the characteristic of electromagnetic field distribution around the arm models are extracted based on numerical analysis, respectively. Results show that geometrical body variations cause a variation of return loss to be up to 30%. © 2011 IEEE.